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L&S alumnus Barry Barish awarded 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics

October 3, 2017

Robert Sanders, Media Relations

L&S alumnus Barry Barish, a retired Caltech physicist, has run many huge physics collaborations during his career, ranging from neutrino experiments at Fermilab to the Superconducting Supercollider. But his most rewarding was the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, called LIGO, which in 2015 detected the first gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago. This discovery has now earned Barish a share of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.